battmanux/rtableau

Rcpp bindings for the Tableau SDK

rtableau

This package uses Rcpp to connect R to the Tableau SDK.

The Tableau SDK functionalities are implemented in this package as two R functions:

• write_tde: Take a R data.frame and output it as a Tableau Data Extract (.tde) file
• write_twbx: Take a R data.frame and update a Tableau Data Workbook (.twbx) file
• publish_tde: Publish a .tde file to a Tableau Server

Set-up

I am still working on the configure file so you may run into issues during installation. You may need to create your own Makevars if you installed in a different location than I did. Install the Tableau SDK before trying to install this package.
I've only tested this on Mac and Linux, here's where my SDK files are installed.

Linux

Shared object files: /usr/lib64/tableausdk/
Binary executable: /usr/local/bin/tdeserver64 You may need to link ln -s libpcre16.so libpcre16.so.0 in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu (I have to do it in ubuntu 16.04)

Mac

/Library/Frameworks

Known Issues

• There are some issues with the 9.3 SDK on Linux when using large datasets, I recommend using the 9.2 version of the SDK which is more stable.
• The Tableau SDK does not support SSL on Linux for publishing

Data Type Mapping

The main challenge of implementing this is that a R data.frame can have arbitrary data structures and types, while C++ is strongly typed. I try to map types but keep in mind you will run into issues if you try and output anything other than a matrix of scalar values.

R vector type	Rcpp vector type	Tableau scalar type
character	CharacterVector	CharString
factor	CharacterVector	CharString
double	NumericVector	Double
integer	IntegerVector	Integer
logical	LogicalVector	Boolean
Date	NumericVector	Date
POSIXct	NumericVector	DateTime
POSIXlt	NumericVector	DateTime

We convert factors to character in R, as well as POSIXlt to POSIXct.

character and factor levels are converted to UTF-8 with protection for brocken characters